In the fall of 1979, I was at loose ends. Gainfully employed but without a place to live, I was bouncing around from friends' floors to couches, to cots in basements, and wondering when this would end, when one evening someone I knew handed me a little ad for a room that they'd cut out of the University of Washington student newspaper. "I thought of you when I saw this," the person said to me. So, a few days later I called on it and drove over to the house, which was in the Ravenna district of Seattle, a mile or so north of the UW campus.
As I pulled up in front of the house, a strange sensation of recognition came over me. Though I'd never been there before, there was something familiar about the house. That's a sense of intuition that used to operate more strongly in me, so I took note of the feeling.
I knocked on the door and when it opened, beaming up at me out of a wheelchair with a thousand watt smile was an 89 year old Ukrainian/German immigrant, as I was later to learn. She invited me into the kitchen for a chat. After only five minutes, she asked if I wanted the room. I wasn't sure, so we continued talking. A few minutes later I suddenly blurted out, "Yes, I would like the room." My host then told me she had interviewed 28 different people but when she opened the door and saw me, she knew I was "the one." This mattered because the room in question was the only one adjoining hers, so the rapport was crucial. Such was my introduction to a new, or an old, friend named Ludmilla Reifschneider.
Ludmilla, or Mrs. Reifschneider, as I came to call her, was born in the region of Bessarabia, which is located around Odessa, situated between the Ukraine and Romania. I quickly discovered that when Mrs. R (as I will now refer to her), who spoke only broken English, would speak a fragmented sentence of pidgin English, I would somehow get the entire thought behind what she had said, and I would respond to the larger thought that I was perceiving. Mrs. R's eyes lit up when she realized this and we shortly thereafter began a series of long three-to-four hour discussions, which covered her early life, our mutual philosophical speculations, and the history of her adult life. You won't find another like it.
So what I intend to do is recount Ludmilla's life, as I remember her telling it to me.
She was born to a country parson and wife. As she told me, at the time there was the tradition of "holy men" still active in Russian/Ukrainian life and there were pictures on the walls of her family home of holy men who lived in various locales around the larger area of Russia.
As her mother told her, one day when she was working in the kitchen, she heard her husband, Ludmilla's father, talking to someone in the living room. Due to the layout of the house, Ludmilla's mother couldn't see to whom her husband was speaking. After about an hour, it occurred to her mother that she was only hearing her husband's voice and no other, so she peeked around the corner. He was alone.
When she asked him to whom he had been speaking, he pointed to one of the "holy men" pictures on the wall and stated that this saintly figure had just paid him a visit and told him many things which he couldn't repeat, but he had been told to wrap up his worldly affairs, as he was going to die in three days. And so it happened.
Later, when Ludmilla was nineteen and, I believe, pursuing an education preparing her to teach, she fell in love with a brilliant seventeen year old student at college. The love was mutual and they married, later having two children, a son and a daughter. It was clear that this was a passionate love, as Mrs. R told me. But, alas, her husband, brilliant as he might be, was prone to drink and when he did, would bring ladies of the night home, in order to "save them."
I asked Mrs. R why she put up with this behavior. She said, "When you truly love someone, you forgive them everything." I'm not sure that would fly today, but this is how she felt then.
Four different times in Ludmilla's life, she lost everything she owned. The first time was during the Russian Revolution. As she recounted it to me, they were all asleep at their house in the country when a man pounded on their door in the middle of the night, telling them all the houses were being put to flame, and that they must join him immediately in his wagon if they wanted to live. They did, and their home and everything in it was burned to the ground.
Somehow, they survived, her husband found employment, and life carried on. Mrs. R told me that as long as Lenin was alive, everything worked. However, the next tragedy occurred -- Ludmilla's husband died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 37. That meant Ludmilla would have been 39, with two children. As she had steadfastly refused to join the Communist Party, finding employment of her own was a dicey proposition. However, a friend was able to procure her a job in a kindergarten, but it would involve a move to another region of the country. So, for the second time, Ludmilla left behind everything that she owned and moved there.
I forgot a story. I'm not sure exactly where it fits in, except that it must have been during the Revolution. As I recall, the two armies were referred to as the White and the Red. A fleeing officer from one of those two armies -- I forget which -- knocked on her door and begged to be hidden. She quickly took him in and duly hid him in her house. When the soldiers of the opposing force came to search her house, they threatened to kill the family if he was found there and although they searched the premises thoroughly, they did not discover the hidden officer, who then escaped.
I asked Mrs. R how she could withstand the danger and emotional tension of such a situation. She said she always felt in her life that God was at her back, and that she was not alone, and that allowed her to be strong. In fact, I remember now that she was always adjuring me to "be strong!"
As life went on, and time rolled into the 1930s, Ludmilla entertained some courters. She showed me a picture of herself, maybe around the age of 29, and she was an attractive woman, but one whose strength of character was evident in her countenance.
There was one German man who kept pursuing her. Ludmilla, who was a redhead, couldn't seem to get rid of him. This man had been sleeping with any redheaded woman he could, purporting to search out whether the hair on their head was dyed or not. I'll leave it to you to figure out how he determined this. Ludmilla was not impressed.
However, three nights running, Ludmilla had a dream in which her first husband appeared to her and told her she must marry this man, as he would become the best friend she would ever have in life. Ludmilla recounted these dreams to her mother, then still living, who told her that because the dream had happened three times, she must obey it as an omen from Spirit. And Ludmilla, when telling me this story, told me that although she passionately loved her first husband, her second husband became the best friend of her life and, if she had to choose which to be with when she died, she would choose her second husband. Even though, as she told me with a twinkle in her eye, he was a lousy lover.
But then WWII broke out and here Ludmilla was, married to a German man, in Russia, in the middle of the war. The two of them fled then, from Russia to Germany, and she had to leave her children, who were older, behind, as well as everything she owned, of course.
And thus she spent the balance of WWII living as a Russian woman married to a German man, in Germany, in fear every moment that her slight accent might give her away.
One night in the middle of the war, Ludmilla awakened to a brilliant apparition of the Virgin Mary hovering over the foot of her bed. Mary told her that all would be well and that she and her husband would survive the war. Her husband awakened while Ludmilla was in the middle of this conversation, perceived something of the light in the room, and after Ludmilla told him what had happened, they both got down on their knees and prayed in thankfulness.
Appropos of nothing, I recall Mrs. R telling me that she had the talent of reading cards and foretelling people's futures, but stopped this at some point. I also recall her telling me of picking mushrooms in the forest to survive and once finding a completely moldy piece of bread which had dropped behind the stove. She ate it.
After the war ended, and the partition of Germany occurred, as fate would have it, Ludmilla and her husband found themselves in East Germany. Life was still hard. They applied to emigrate to America and the day came for their interview. Her husband went in first and so enraged the immigration official that Ludmilla rushed in, smoothed the situation over, and they were allowed to emigrate. I think this was in 1950, perhaps later. And for the fourth time in her life, Ludmilla Reifschneider left behind all her worldly possessions.
They were sponsored by a church in Seattle. Although her husband was an engineer, and she also had a university education, they spoke no English. So they became the live-in janitors for the church. They scrimped and saved all their earnings. One day, Ludmilla saw a particular house for sale. She realized that due to its proximity to the University of Washington campus, and the rabbit warren of rooms in the house -- I forget how many rooms it had but I seem to remember rooms on three floors and bathrooms both upstairs and in the basement -- at any rate, Ludmilla realized this house would be their support in life.
Unfortunately, Ludmilla's husband was opposed to the purchase. For the first time in their life together, Ludmilla stood up against her husband and insisted that they buy the house. He became so angry -- "red-faced," as she told me -- that he was impotent ever after. Again, with a twinkle, she told me it was no great loss, and the house became their home, and it was exactly as she had pictured it -- the never-ending stream of students paid for most of their expenses for the rest of their lives.
Her husband had died some years before I arrived on the scene. But somehow, after arriving in America, Ludmilla discovered that both of her children had survived the war and were living in the Soviet Union. Because she was in America and the Cold War was on in full force, Ludmilla posed as her children's aunt and began 25 years or more of sending material things to them. She knew all her letters would be read, originating in the USA, so this ruse continued until at last travel to the Soviet Union was allowed in the mid-Seventies. Ludmilla travelled as the "aunt" and was able to meet with both of her children. I recall her saying how they whispered within their own apartment when they spoke with her, for fear of being found out.
And it was one of my regular chores to go to stores and purchase whatever Mrs. R wanted me to get, and then it would be boxed up and shipped to the Soviet Union.
Although I stayed in the room less than a year, the friendship endured. A few salient characteristics of Mrs. R -- she believed in reincarnation. In fact, she told me she knew me from before. She thought it possible that I might have been her brother. Strange to say, around the same time I gave a popular musician a ride up to Vancouver, Canada, to do a show (I had produced a concert for him in Seattle), and he told me that I had a strange earthy wisdom about "the body" and I reminded him of a Russian peasant. As I believe we all live countless lives, and we encounter one another over and over, in different roles and guises, I had no problem sharing Mrs. R's point of view.
She had jokingly told me that when she died, she would appear to me in a dream. But she still wanted to live. Finally, in the spring of 1984, after a long stay in the hospital, she told me she no longer wanted to live and died shortly thereafter.
And sure enough, one night that summer, in the middle of a dream the phone rang, and a voice began to speak to me. Guess who it was?! All the hair on my neck and arms stood up at once, but bless her heart, my friend Mrs. R had kept her promise. I should have known she would.
